Five kinds of double-negation

A recent question on the TYPES mailing list reminded me that one reason negation is confusing is because it can mean so many different things. I and others originally thought the answer the person was looking for (the type-theoretic reading of negation) was "continuations", but it turned out his intuition was about a different form of negation not usually considered in constructive logic (but available in "refinement type systems", etc.), since it's tied to the "extrinsic" interpretation of types-as-properties. (For more on this deficit of constructive logic, see the introduction to Paul Taylor's Subspaces in Abstract Stone Duality.)

But even restricted to plain old type theory, there are many different interpretations of negation! Under the principle of "Why talk about something confusing when you can talk about something doubly confusing?", today I want to talk about different computational interpretations of double negations in logic.

1. (A -> 0) -> 0. Here 0 is falsehood, and this is the standard interpretation of double-negation in intuitionistic logic. What does this mean computationally? Well, one way to think about this is to interpret types as sets. How many different functions f : X -> 0 are there from any set X into the empty set? None, unless X is itself empty, in which case there is exactly one. Applying this reasoning to our double-negation, if A is non-empty, then A -> 0 is empty, which in turn means that (A -> 0) -> 0 contains exactly one element; conversely, if A is empty, then A -> 0 is non-empty, which in turns means that (A -> 0) -> 0 is empty. What we see is that intuitionistic double-negation encodes the principle of proof-irrelevance, i.e., it forgets all the computational content of a type. (The catch here is that set-theoretic reasoning doesn't always prove type isomorphisms—this argument really only works for extensional type theory.)
2. (A -> ⊥) -> ⊥. Here ⊥ represents "minimal" falsehood, i.e., simply a logical atom with no introduction or elimination rules, and in particular without the principle of explosion. Because we have replaced "empty" with "unknown", minimal double-negation does not have the same computational degeneracy of intuitionistic double-negation: there are at least as many different constructive proofs of (A -> ⊥) -> ⊥ as there are of A, and often more. For example, in general there is no proof in minimal logic of excluded middle A ∨ (A -> ⊥), but there is a proof of ((A ∨ (A -> ⊥)) -> ⊥) -> ⊥. Indeed, minimal logic rather than intuitionistic logic really is the proper place to understand the computational content of the classical double-negation translations (something which I didn't fully appreciate until reading Jeremy Avigad's The computational content of classical arithmetic). As such, this form of double-negation is the first step towards understanding continuation-passing style.
3. (A -> R) -> R, where R is any type of answers. We said that ⊥ above is a logical atom. In type-theoretic terms, it is a type variable. So to move to this form double-negation, we simply instantiate the variable with a concrete type R. Now, logically we are beginning to stretch the meaning of "negation". In particular, nothing says that R is uninhabited—indeed if it is provably uninhabited, we are back to the computationally degenerate situation (1). But whether or not we accept the terminology, this form of double-negation is extremely important computationally, tied to the representation of control flow. A function of type A -> R is a continuation (transforming any value of type A into a result of type R), and so a term of type (A -> R) -> R is something which takes a continuation to a result—a computation with "control effects". The type (A -> R) -> R is so powerful that it comes with the following warning: Abuse of the Continuation monad can produce code that is impossible to understand and maintain. The "principle of double-confusion" I mentioned at the beginning then motivates the following pair of generalizations...
4. (A -> R1) -> R2, where R1 and R2 are two (possibly distinct) types of answers. This form of double-negation comes up in the study of delimited control operators, which were originally motivated by the fact that the type (A -> R) -> R is not only too powerful but also not powerful enough. The type (A -> R1) -> R2 can be seen as a sort of Hoare triple {R1}A{R2}, which gives an intimation of its power.
5. ∀α.(A -> α) -> α, a polymorphic type (and more generally, ∀α.(A -> Tα) -> Tα, where T is an arbitrary monad). It's easy to see that A ≡ ∀α.(A -> α) -> α is provable in second-order intuitionistic logic, but in fact this can also be interpreted as the Yoneda isomorphism in category theory, as sigfpe explained a few years ago. More generally, there is a Yoneda isomorphism between TA and ∀α.(A -> Tα) -> Tα for any monad T (and formally, a type isomorphism in System F + parametricity axioms). This isomorphism lies at the heart of Filinski's representation theorem that delimited control operators can be used to perform "monadic reflection".

So that is a small cast of characters, biased towards the view of "negation as continuation" (which as I said, is not the only view). For more plots involving these different forms of double-negation (particularly (4) and (5)), you can read the paper I posted two weeks ago.

Polarity and the logic of delimited continuations

Text: pdf
Code: twelf
Abstract:

Polarized logic is the logic of values and continuations, and their interaction through continuation-passing style. The main limitations of this logic are the limitations of CPS: that continuations cannot be composed, and that programs are fully sequentialized. Delimited control operators were invented in response to the limitations of classical continuation-passing. That suggests the question: what is the logic of delimited continuations?

We offer a simple account of delimited control, through a natural generalization of the classical notion of polarity. This amounts to breaking the perfect symmetry between positive and negative polarity in the following way: answer types are positive. Despite this asymmetry, we retain all of the classical polarized connectives, and can explain "intuitionistic polarity" (e.g., in systems like CBPV) as a restriction on the use of connectives, i.e., as a logical fragment. Our analysis complements and generalizes existing accounts of delimited control operators, while giving us a rich logical language through which to understand the interaction of control with monadic effects.

To appear at LICS 2010.

Writing this paper helped me sort out some things I'd been puzzled about for a while—I hope you also find it useful!